The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (26 page)

Those from the working classes whose trades slowed or ceased in summer found similar work, hop picking, or in market gardens. Pea picking was ideal for women with small children, as they could operate in rotation: families working together could sometimes make 4s a day in the ten-week season. Some had to juggle jobs not from month to month but from week to week. A stick seller offering whips, crops and walking sticks did a brisk trade in the parks and near excursion sites on Sundays in summer, but for the rest of the time needed to find another commodity more in demand.

Many more spent their lives ‘on the tramp’, a sort of forced moving on, as if in parody of the upper-class life of moving from home to home around the country. Trampers generally spent the summer and autumn in the countryside or suburbs, working as builders’ labourers, brickmakers, navvies or agricultural labourers. In the winter, when no building work was done outside the capital, they headed back to London where they could find work, if not on building sites, then in subsidiary industries such
as brickmaking,
⁵¹
or in gasworks, which required more labourers in the cold months, or in breweries after the hop harvest, or as chimney sweeps, who also had more work in winter. Showmen left London between March and April to tour the Easter fairs, returning to the city in October for the London fair season.

A shoemaker around 1810 walked daily from his half-room, as he called it (that is, the section of the room he rented from its primary tenant), to the Barbican, across Smithfield and onwards, going ‘occasioning’, where he went into each shoemaker’s he passed, asking if any of them had occasion to hire him to do a day’s work.
⁵²
William Lovett, originally a Cornish rope maker, in 1821 came to London to find work, lodging with other Cornishmen by the docks and becoming an itinerant labourer. He and a friend got up at five every morning ‘and walked about enquiring at different shops and buildings till about nine’; they paused to share a penny loaf before looking for work again until four or five in the afternoon, ‘when we finished our day’s work with another divided loaf’. After a fortnight three Cornish carpenters offered to find him work on a building site for a fee of 2s 6d. This was not avarice, just recognition that everyone was living at subsistence level, and a few pennies made a difference. Such trade-offs were not uncommon. At mid-century the sack- and bag-making trade was entirely supplied by women who collected canvas from the warehouses in Bermondsey by the river, carrying the bundles home on their heads to make up the bags as piecework. One woman earned a useful 6d a day by this trade, but being small and slightly built, ‘she can’t carry the sacks home as other gals do; so a strong young woman...carries them home for her, and charges her twopence for it’.

Trampers had a variety of places to stay, either overnight, weekly or for the season. Many were in the well-known slum areas: St Giles, Tothill Fields near Parliament, the Mint, south of the river; some lay in the suburbs, near
the market gardens and other work areas. Notting Dale (later gentrified as Notting Hill) was one of the first tramp sites, settled by pig-keepers who had been driven out of Tyburn (later Marble Arch) as it moved upmarket. Lodging houses for trampers cost up to 3d a day at mid-century, 6d a day in later years, and were for those in skilled trades and regular employment. Many trampers slept outdoors, by the brickfields if possible (the kilns stayed warm all night); others haunted the markets, where could be found late-night coffee stalls, the chance of odd jobs or, at worst, shelter under a trestle after the market closed. One alternative was the ‘Dry Arch Hotels’, the vaults under the bridges and later the railway viaducts: the Great Eastern Railway’s arches at Spitalfields regularly sheltered sixty men every night; while the 500 arches under the line from Rotherhithe along the south-east corner of London offered a refuge to almost a whole town’s population.

Even people in employment lived in such places, for sometimes it was seen as an improvement on what they might find in one of London’s great slums.

7.

SLUMMING

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word ‘slum’ was unknown. Instead, ‘rookery’ was the usual word for overcrowded living conditions – as many rooks build their nests in a single tree, so a court ‘is known by the name of the “Rookery”, (from there being a humble family in each room)’. That ‘to rook’ had long meant to cheat added a moralistic note: rookeries were where the dishonest and disreputable lived. The word ‘slum’ emerged gradually during the late 1820s, gathering pace as did the growth of slums themselves.

This growth was driven by the rapidly increasing numbers of London’s inhabitants. Between 1800 and 1850 the population of England doubled. At the same time, agricultural work was giving way to advancing industrialization and factory labour. In 1801, 70 per cent of the population lived in the country; fifty years later, this figure had been reduced to just 49 per cent. Migration, particularly from Ireland during the Famine years towards the middle of the century, resulted in the eighteenth-century infrastructure of London being swamped by the huge mass of its nineteenth-century residents. Transport, sanitation, food distribution, housing: none could cope with the numbers pouring into the capital every day.

The changing attitude to the poor, and the consequent creation of the harsh new Poor Laws in the 1830s, must be seen against this background. At the beginning of the century, there was a general acceptance of the poor – some were good, some were bad, some lazy, some worked hard: just as with the wealthy. In a series of views of London, which Rowlandson illustrated between 1808 and 1810, the caption to a picture of the Westminster Workhouse, with its happy, well-fed paupers, reads: ‘The establishment
of a permanent and certain provision for the aged and the helpless, not of occasional bounty, but of uncontrovertible [sic] right, and the anxious care which has watched...over every abuse or neglect in the execution of them, may be placed in competition with the greatest of our national achievements.’ Workhouses were shelter for the very aged or the ill; the healthy and working poor who could not make ends meet received ‘outdoor relief’ of both money and food, supplemented sometimes by clothes, shoes and assistance in finding apprenticeships for their children. By the 1830s, however, increasing urbanism, population and inequality of income, creaking infrastructure and the rise in evangelical morality helped to create a view that the poor were poor not because of misfortune, or because wages were too low, but because they were drunken and lazy, probably immoral and dissolute, and no doubt rogues and thieves to boot. Even those who were generously inclined, who did not believe that being poor by definition made a person bad, used language that suggested they saw the poor as different from themselves in essential ways.
Oliver Twist
was an outraged response to the new Poor Laws; even so, Dickens used the words ‘wild’ and ‘voracious’ – as of an animal – to describe the workhouse children. Mayhew, a decade later, in the equally sympathetic
London Labour and the London Poor
, saw the poor as a ‘tribe’, that is, a group that was distinct from both the author and his readers.

Dickens and Mayhew were representative of many, possibly most, of the middle classes in this feeling of them and us. Those who were far less sympathetic objected to the growing number of workers receiving money under the old Poor Laws, which, through cash payments linked to the price of bread, had long enabled employers to pay their workers less than a living wage. In response, the 1824 Vagrancy Act criminalized the state of being indigent: begging and sleeping out without visible means of support were made criminal acts. (Thus, in
Oliver Twist
, when Oliver runs away, he is breaking the law by being on the road with no money.) In 1832, a Royal Commission was established, heavily weighted towards the Utilitarian philosophy that was hostile to the notion of the state subsidizing employers in this fashion. Two years later the Poor Law Amendment Act established a system in which outdoor relief was first reduced, then ultimately abolished
almost entirely. In Southwark and the East End, before 1830 each pauper received 3s a week; by the mid-1860s, those who had some other form of income received less than 1s a week. A poor person who was entirely dependent on the parish was forced into the workhouse.

The problems inherent in the new arrangements soon became obvious. The Poor Law Guardians, who oversaw the system, were elected by ratepayers who had a vested interest in keeping expenditure down. Initially, the workhouses were meant to create an orderly life – no alcohol nor tobacco, early to work and early to rise, but with nourishing food and decent living conditions – in which the impoverished worker would learn the habits of gainful employment. But it was feared that if the workhouses were warm and well lit, the paupers well fed and well clothed, then there would be no incentive to work. Thus the notion of making the workhouses less ‘eligible’, or desirable, became central, with workhouses rendered ‘as prison-like as possible’. Families were separated: men lived on one side, women on the other, with school for the children and work for all – preferably grinding, repetitive, meaningless work to discourage people from entering the workhouse until they were
in extremis
. The paupers were allowed no personal possessions; they were dressed in deliberately unattractive uniforms; their hair was cut unbecomingly (they were, said Dickens, ‘pollarded’); they had to ask permission to leave the premises; their food was insufficient, and of the coarsest kind. The entire aim was to make them unhappy, and to make the better-off despise them. For many, these aims were achieved. In
Little Dorrit
, Old Nandy is forced into the workhouse at the end of his life. ‘It was Old Nandy’s birthday, and they let him out. He said nothing about its being his birthday, or they might have kept him in; for such old men should not be born.’ When Little Dorrit accompanies the old man in his workhouse clothes, she is berated by her sister for ‘coming along the open streets, in the broad light of day, with a Pauper!’

The Master of a workhouse was expected to ensure that the workhouse functioned, that the paupers were diligent and disciplined, that the staff kept order, that the accounts balanced and no more was spent than was necessary. The ratepayers’ primary demand on him was to keep costs down, and cutting staff in quality and quantity was the easiest way. Workhouses
were therefore run by people who could not get better jobs, and the fact that cruelty abounded was hardly a surprise. Yet the very existence of the workhouses was used by many, as Dickens noted so savagely, as an excuse to do nothing for the most wretched in society. In
A Christmas Carol
, when some philanthropic men approach Scrooge for a contribution to help the ‘Many thousands [who] are in want of common necessaries’, Scrooge refuses: ‘those who are badly off,’ he declares, should take themselves off to the workhouse.

Dickens returned again and again to the attitudes that had permitted the creation of this injustice. Written three years after the passing of the new Poor Laws,
Oliver Twist
, with its depiction of the ravenous children in the workhouse, is today the most famous description of the horrors of this penal system disguised as charity. Dickens as a young man had lived in lodgings in Norfolk Street, now 22 Cleveland Street, steps away from the huge Cleveland Street Workhouse (still surviving today almost intact). In 1843, in
A Christmas Carol
, he made this tale of the miser Scrooge’s reform another enraged commentary on the Poor Laws; he wrote memorably on the same subject in
Little Dorrit
in the mid-1850s. In
Our Mutual Friend
in 1865, five years before his death, he created Betty Higden, the poor woman who in old age becomes an itinerant pedlar to avoid being taken to the workhouse: ‘Kill me sooner than take me there. Throw this pretty child under cart-horses’ feet and a loaded waggon, sooner than take him there...D o I never read in the newspapers...how [the paupers] are grudged, grudged, grudged, the shelter, or the doctor, or the drop of physic, or the bit of bread?...Johnny, my pretty...You pray that your Granny may have strength enough left her at the last...to get up from her bed and run and hide herself...sooner than fall into the hands of those...that...worry and weary, and scorn and shame, the decent poor.’ ‘It is,’ Dickens added savagely, ‘a remarkable Christian improvement, to have made a pursuing Fury of the Good Samaritan.’ From his second to his penultimate novel, the evils of the workhouse ran through everything he wrote. He was not alone in his views. Even that bastion of middle-class rectitude,
The Times
, condemned the laws as an ‘appalling machine...for wringing the hearts of forlorn widowhood, for refusing the crust to
famished age, for imprisoning the orphan in workhouse dungeons, and for driving to prostitution the friendless and unprotected’.

But many dismissed these views, claiming that all beggars were thieves living at the expense of the hard-working. In Pierce Egan’s
Life in London
, early as 1821, a crossing-sweeper, arrested for abusing a woman who refused to give him a tip, asks, ‘Who would
work hard
for a few shillings...when, with only a broom...a
broom
...a
polite bow
and a
genteel appearance
...the
ladies
could be
gammoned
[fooled] out of pounds per week.’ Instead of the bare living that the work in actuality provided, Egan’s novel presents his sweeper as earning £1 a day regularly – the income of a small tradesman. Many people wanted to believe these myths for economic reasons. A journalist touring the slums of Bermondsey in the mid-1860s was told that the poor positively ‘liked dirt, and wouldn’t use water not if it was tapped and messed into every room of the place’. His guide finished triumphantly by saying there was no point complaining to the parish, because the vestrymen who determined how much could be spent on poor relief were also the owners of these slum dwellings.